UKRAINIAN ENDGAME: THE OPTIONS

04/07/2025 Owen Matthews

Stop war picture ©Berghof Foundation

We’re now more than two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, and only one thing is clear – that the scenarios for the end of the war in Ukraine have become as unpredictable as the incumbent of the Oval Office himself.

That said, the two fundamental dynamics that are likely to define the final phase of the war remain the same.

Dismal dynamics

The first is that Ukraine has next to no prospect of making significant gains on the battlefield as long as Russia retains the ability to replenish its war machine through exports of oil and gas. 

Indeed. in December Maj-Gen Kirilo Budanov – head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR – gave a dire warning to a closed session of the Rada, the country’s parliament.

He said there was a serious danger of a Ukrainian military collapse as soon as this summer. Even in the unlikely event that Ukraine is able to reestablish supplies of long-range rocketry, air-defence systems, attack aircraft and armour, the combination of an ongoing recruitment crisis and the exhaustion of front-line troops – most of whom have been fighting for three years – mean that Kyiv is simply running out of troops faster than Moscow.

The second fundamental dynamic is the deteriorating democratic legitimacy of the Zelensky government.

Though polling has proved controversial and often contradictory, two indicators stand out across surveys. One is that 65-70% of Ukrainians think the government is profiteering from the war. The other is that less than 20% of them would vote incumbent president Volodymyr Zelensky a second term, True, a considerably higher proportion trust his current leadership. But future voting intentions are an important subtext to present legitimacy

Of course, it’s a truism that all political careers end in failure. But Zelensky now finds himself in a peculiarly tragic position. Nationalists criticise him for making concessions to Russia and allowing himself to be bullied by the West, while war-weary citizens damn him for pressing on with a hopeless conflict that Ukraine cannot hope to win.

In practical terms, there is broad agreement that elections must be held, as Zelensky’s mandate expired in May 2024. But whether these should be held quickly after a ceasefire or postponed until after a lasting peace deal remains a subject of intense internal political debate. And some observers and friends of Ukraine in the EU have been disturbed by criminal charges brought against former president Petro Poroshenko and by reported attempts to sideline and exclude former army chief Valery Zaluzhny.

The Trump factor

And now there’s the new man in the White House. Whose advent, on the face of it, has been a disaster for Kyiv.

Senior Trump officials had scarcely arrived before they began to parrot all kinds of Kremlin narratives about Ukraine. It wasn’t a “real country”. Legitimate referendums had approved Russian takeover of Ukrainian re\gions after after the 2022 invasion – as if the presence of occupying troops had nothing to do with it. A “huge upside” of future cooperation with Russia could be anticipated. And so on.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was unceremoniously thrown under the bus by Trump and his sidekicks.

Its president was humiliated in the Oval Office; supplies of hardware and access to intelligence were suspended, with serious military results; and the country’s mineral wealth was carved up.

All in all, the world seemed intent on proving to Russian president Vladimir Putin the wisdom of an old Chinese proverb: that one should sit quietly by the river and wait for the corpse of one’s enemy to float by.

Putin overreaches

But inevitably, because he is arrogant and lives in a bubble of yes-men and old KGB apparatchiks, Putin immediately overplayed his hand.

He pretended to agree with the principles of the peace process, but then resorted to classic salami tactics to delay the process for as long as possible.

Trump had bullied the Ukrainians into agreeing to a complete ceasefire on land, sea and air for 30 days without preconditions. Putin’s counter-offer was a 30 day suspension of attacks on energy infrastructure – which he didn’t bother observing anyway.

It seemed as though the Russians believed they were negotiating with toddlers, who would somehow mistake the ’30-day ceasefire’ headline for actual cooperation.

The failings of Trump’s national security team may be legion. However, they are not fools, and they know delaying tactics when they see them. A two-hour Trump Putin phone call in early March was followed by a “honeymoon period”. But the honeymoon soon ended abruptly, when two pieces of Russian braggadocio proved too much for the Americans to bear.

The first came when Grigory Karasin, who led the Russian delegation in the ceasefire discussions with the US in late March, said that a ceasefire might not come “this year or at the end of this year”. It would, he added, “be naive to expect any breakthrough results at the very first meeting.”

That was neither a tactful nor a clever thing to say. For “breakthrough results” – and fast – were exactly what the Americans expected and craved. Anything else just wouldn’t have been the style of Trump’s move-fast-and-break-things new administration.

The second faux pas came when Putin piled on the overreach by floating the idea that Zelensky and his government should be replaced by a UN-approved administration until a peace deal is reached.

Angry Donald, ticking clock

The sequel suggests that “The Donald” may not be quite the chump that the Kremlin has taken him for. On March 29, he told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he was “pissed off” with Russia over its foot-dragging about a ceasefire in Ukraine. As to Putin’s demand for a transitional government in Kyiv as the price for peace negotiations, that had made Trump “very angry.” And the White House is now admitting that there won’t be a ceasefire in Ukraine any time soon, not in the coming months and even less before Easter.

If Putin has any sense at all, he’ll take those words very seriously. Because Trump may turn out to be an orange version of the Incredible Hulk: the Kremlin won’t like him when he’s angry!

Most ominously for the Russians, Trump has actually set a clock ticking. The US expects a ceasefire deal to be done fast – and if it’s not, Washington will crack down hard on Russian exports of oil, the one commodity which is most vital to fuelling Putin’s war machine.

“Secondary tariffs”…..

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault … I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said. “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25 to 50-point tariff on all [Russian] oil.”

Now, the phrase “secondary tariffs” is an odd way to refer to what would, from context, appear to be secondary sanctions. But someone as tariff-obsessed as Trump can perhaps be forgiven the slip. And, if they were indeed imposed, secondary sanctions would mark a colossal escalation in America’s economic warfare on the Kremlin.

Though a whole forest of sanctions imposed on Russia has grown since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s main exports – oil and gas – have never actually been restricted in any meaningful way. The closest to an actual sanction is a price cap of $60 a barrel on Russian crude. But, since the market price is currently $64, that ‘sanction’ is close to meaningless. Imposing secondary sanctions on Russian oil would be precisely the opposite – not meaningless, but deadly for the Russian economy.

….or maybe not

The question, however, is whether Trump will actually be ready to pay the cost.

·        India has become a major importer of Russian crude, as has China. Does Trump propose to start a trade war with both?

·        Europe remains a major importer of Russian crude oil. Indeed Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, continues to operate major refineries in the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria.

·        Russian gas supplied via pipelines is less of an item than it used to be – though far from negligible – but in 2024 Europe’s biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) was Russia. Not, incidentally, the US!

Over the three years of the war European consumers have contributed far more to the Kremlin’s coffers in the form of payments for oil and gas than they have provided Ukraine in support of its resistance. US ‘tariffs’ against Russian oil would be devastating to Europe too, and would send world oil prices skyrocketing. Trump doesn’t seem too fussy about hurting allies, but he might hesitate to inflict high gasolene prices on American motorists. So it’s a moot point whether his threats are credible.

Mr Dmitriev goes to Washington

But maybe Vladimir Putin is playing it safe, For he responded last week by making his own business pitch to the White House. Specifically, he sent Kirill Dmitriev to Washington.

Now, Dmitriev is an interesting figure, to say the least. Still not quite 50 years old, he was US-educated from the age of 14, A business school graduate who has worked successfully in Goldman Sachs, he speaks the language of America’s business elite. He’s also head of the Kremlin’s $10bn sovereign wealth fund, and has latterly been involved in talks regarding Ukraine held in the Gulf, a region where he has long-standing connections. So he seems to enjoy Putin’s trust.

Just the man, in other words, for top-level talks aimed at launching a new era of business cooperation between the US and Russia. His task in Washington was to talk up a raft of (supposedly) huge mineral deals in the Arctic – and, while he was about it, to “reset” relations between the two countries. Such a reset being, he said, "exactly what the world needs for lasting global security and peace.”

The fact that Dmitriev was in Washington at all was, in its way, a sign of Trump’s favour towards Putin: Dmitriev is on a US list of sanctioned persons, but the restriction this involved was quietly and temporarily waived. And there was also another, more important – and quite unmistakable – sign of favour: Russia was conspicuous by its absence from the rather long list of countries affected by the tariff measures Trump announced on April 3.

Nonetheless, the Kremlin was clearly rattled by Trump’s talk of being ‘very angry’ at Russia’s foot-dragging over ceasefire negotiations. Which may explain the fresh tack: Moscow’s new plan is to try talking to Trump in the kind of transactional language it thinks he understands. Coming soon after Volodymyr Zelensky’s refusal to play ball over a re-written US-Ukraine minerals deal, Putin's message to Trump is clear: Zelensky doesn't want to be your friend or do business with you. But I do.

It’s pitch perfect, music to the ears of the greedy US president. Not only greedy, indeed, but Arctic-obsessed: the region’s security, minerals and shipping potential have clearly been on the White House’s mind – witness Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and JD Vance’s recent not-entirely-happy adventures on the world’s biggest island.

And now here’s Dmitriev enthusing about the Arctic – on X! The Arctic is a chance to "tap a $1T+ opportunity” including “13% of untapped oil & 30% of gas 260 million tons per annum shipping via Northern Sea Route by 2035 and a 30–40% faster Europe–Asia trade path vs. Suez.” According to Dmitriev, "the next frontier is here” in the frozen north, “the gateway to Earth's crown jewel.”

It’s the stuff that speeches (and roadshows) are made of. And let’s not quibble if the numbers are conveniently unverifiable in the short term. They are big – and that’s what counts.

Meanwhile the Ukraine minerals deal, apparently so important at the time of end-February’s Oval Office fracas, is losing its lustre. That’s partly thanks to Zelensky’s resistance. But it’s partly also because tiresome experts have been busy debunking it – and specifically the figures originally bandied about on how much titanium, lithium, graphite and uranium Ukraine had, and how much it would cost to extract it.

Well, the Kremlin has baited its hook. It remains to be seen whether Trump will bite. Resistance to US–Russia dialogue is "driven by entrenched interests and old narratives,” claims Dmitriev. Meanwhile Washington's bottom line is clear and unchanged: a ceasefire in Ukraine must be achieved soon. Trump needs it and feels the urgency, his prestige and ego on the line.

Putin’s timeline is somewhat longer. His big mission is to convert the US from Russia’s adversary into Russia’s partner. If he succeeds, not only will the endgame of the Ukraine war be transformed, but the entire strategic alignment of the Western world will be shaken to its foundations.